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Rating:
For the first 30 minutes or so, when the premise is established, Accepted is a stupid but funny throwaway teen/college comedy. The cast is spirited and the writing by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, and Mark Perez and direction by Steve Pink is fast paced and off-center enough to make the material feel fresh. But after Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) and his loser friends set up fake South Harmon Institute of Technology (because they fail to make the college of their choice) and unwittingly enroll a couple hundred other kids in the process, the energy suddenly deflates and the story treads water with umpteen ill-conceived party montages until the closing, when Gaines must fight for the school's accreditation against the evil dean and ruling frat of nearby Harmon College. Besides a lack of notable story developments, Accepted has a hard time figuring out whether it wants to be an irreverent skewering of overpriced, useless higher education (represented by Lewis Black as South Harmon's ranting dean) or an earnest defense of its outsider heroes against the preppy conformist institutions they are pressured into by their parents. The "if it feels good do it" ethos of South Harmon is supposed to represent the unleashed desires of real college kids, but with no visible sex, drug use, tepid drinking, and the alleged crazy awesomeness of a half-pipe on campus, it's tamer than most college campuses. The movie skirts, but seems too corporately tame to make much of, its defining subtext: that after the pressure in high school to get into college, what kids really want to do for four years is get wasted and sit on their butts. Isn't the South Harmon experience what most people already pay for and get? Michael Buening, All Movie Guide

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